1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to distributing personalized content.
2. Related Art
Known distribution systems for content include broadcast systems, such as broadcast radio and broadcast television, and personalized systems, such as direct purchases of records and videotapes. Recent developments in content distribution include digital storage of content and digital distribution of content, including both audio and video. For example, it is now possible to store popular songs on disk and distribute those songs to recipients using a communication network.
One problem in the known art is that distributing personalized information greatly increases the bandwidth used for distribution. At any one moment, each individual recipient can have different desires for content, so a large number of recipients can use substantial amounts of distribution bandwidth. Distribution bandwidth includes both the communication infrastructure to transmit that content to recipients, as well as the infrastructure to retrieve that content from storage and present that content to the communication infrastructure. For example, while it can be relatively easy to store several thousand songs on magnetic media, it is still relatively difficult to retrieve more than a few dozen of those songs from magnetic media simultaneously.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to distribute personalized content to potentially large numbers of recipients, without incurring the problems of the known art. This advantage is achieved in an embodiment of the invention in which a pool is selected, from among all content available for distribution, of those content elements that will be made available for simultaneous distribution, and personalized content is selected for distribution from that pool.